Barry Tompkins: What history will tell us about the Miwoks and the Teslans

Bay Area sportscaster Barry Tompkins sits in a restaurant on Monday, Aug. 22, 2011, in Fairfax, Calif. He began his career in San Francisco in 1965 and has worked for HBO and Fox Sports Net. He is known for his work as a boxing commentator, but has covered football and other sports. He lives nearby in Ross.
(IJ photo/Frankie Frost
Frankie Frost

I FIND MYSELF absolutely fascinated by the story in this week's IJ about the discovery of some remains and artifacts that archaeologists say could be almost 4,500 years old. The relics were found by workers excavating for the new multimillion-dollar homes being built on the site of the old Niven Nursery in Larkspur.

It seems that, like so much of our county, this was once an area that housed Native Americans, in this case Miwoks.

Among the findings were more than 42,000 shell beads and more than 7,200 animal bones. It took 18 months for archaeologists to determine that the beads were indeed Miwok artifacts and not from a "Going out of business" sale at a Haight Street head shop. The bones, it was determined, were definitively not from a former butcher shop on the site when it was discovered some were from grizzly bears, black bears and sea otter. It is widely speculated that the Miwoks were extremely fond of steamed sea otter, especially as a side dish with rack of black bear.

For their part, the tribe — now overseen by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria — has a policy to respectfully rebury items and not preserve them for study. This left the archeologists with several thousand pages of notes and nothing to put in a jar and show their friends at the next cocktail party when they tell the hilarious story of finding a grizzly bear in Larkspur.

And, frankly, the archaeologists just weren't "diggin' it."

In the end, all is well for all parties. The archeologists got half of their wish on show-and-tell day at the California Archaeology conference recently in Visalia.

The Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria are much too busy running their recently opened Graton Resort and Casino in Rohnert Park, where the only bones to be seen have black dots on them and generate a whole lot more income than sea otter remains.

And the Larkspur town council is frantically running around trying to determine if the Miwoks had a proper building permit in 2486 B.C.

And, don't you know that 4,500 years from now there'll be a new archaeological discovery equally amazing, and equally mysterious. I can see it now:

April 27, 6514

WINNEMUCCA, Nevada — Construction workers doing excavation on the new Winnemucca Boardwalk Ocean Front Hotel and Casino have discovered a mound of ancient ruins that could stem back as far as 4,500 years — possibly just before the plunging of the entire state of California into what was then called the Pacific Ocean. The relics discovered could be those of a tribe that resided north of the Golden Gate Bridge, now a popular tourist attraction in nearby Elko.

The tribe is believed to have been called the Teslans, whose ancient mode of transportation allowed them only 300 miles of range — far less than it would have taken to escape what historians have dubbed "The Big One."

The Teslans seemed to speak no known language, but rather communicated only with their thumbs and a small electronic device. One such device discovered at the site, revealed an ancient message that read simply, "OMG WTF is up? Not LMAO."

Not much is known about the Teslan culture, but it is believed that liquid holding receptacles found at the site with crude scrawlings of words like Frappucino and Macchiato would indicate that they perhaps derived from the ancient Romans.

The ultimate demise of the Teslans, history tells us, could have been as the result of their primitive eating habits. The miracle of gluten, which has since been discovered as the cure for everything from bunions to dengue fever, was shunned by these ancient peoples. The Teslans seemed to also be a barbaric tribe. Inscriptions on artifacts found seem to describe some sort of vegetable infanticide. Baby artichokes, corn, lettuce and carrots — robbed of their adulthood only to be ingested by this group of herbivorous pagans.

In a related story, the Larkspur town council has cited the Miwoks for a code violation having to do with the town's ban on black bear barbecuing in an area where there might someday be a nursery.

Barry Tompkins is a longtime sports broadcaster who lives in Marin. Contact him at barry tompkins1@gmail.com.